What Are People Talking About in Education (alpha)?

As usual I”ve been reading up on education news, trolling some blogs and participating in a bunch of twitter chats. Apart from a few stories, however the news was local and the twitter chats were with intimate, smaller groups. I really wanted to get a better idea about what are some of the major themes being blogged or written about in education.

So I decided to make this word cloud of all the major education news sites and blogs highlighted on Guy Kawasaki”s AllTop Education page. By no means is this comprehensive but I felt the sampling was representative of education in general as it included a whole bunch of blogs and most of the major education news sources.

Once I created the word cloud using Wordle, I decided to trim some of the common education keywords such as education, schools, students, teachers, teaching, university, etc. to get an idea of the real themes being discussed. This second word cloud below is representative of that.

The results are pretty much what you might expect but being able to see it visually is really helpful. I kept the maximum number of words to 500 as it helped some of the major clusters stand out. This is my first pass at this. At some point I want to be able to drill down by specific categories like Ed-tech, K12 or K20, etc. so we can have more specific insights as to what people are talking about.

Let me know what you think in the comments!

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